Friday, December 14, 2012

On December 8, 1980 I was in Ocean City, New Jersey, making pizza on the
boardwalk at Mack & Mancos and writing a weekly music column for the
Atlantic City Sun, a now defunct weekl. The Sun was then owned by Jeffrey
Douglas, who was hosting an office Christmas party at his Linwood home the
following night after the paper was out on the street.

I forget where I was when I first heard that John Lennon was shot and killed,
but one of the first things I did when I learned about it was to call my
college friend Kathy Engro, who lived right across the street from the Dakota
apartments where Lennon was shot.

Kathy was a year behind me at the University
of Dayton (Ohio),
where we were both radicalized by the Vietnam War and the movement for
educational reform. My freshman year Kevin Kief was the student body president,
a tall, thin, long haired radical hippie, who went on to become a chief
assistant to the spiritual advisor to the United Nations.

There were two other student body presidents after Kevin who were also pretty
radical, but then Kathy Engro was elected, I think probably the first women to
be in that position. Her boyfriend, John Judge, was also a radical student who
had graduated a few years earlier but stayed around to give the administration
trouble, or a conscience.

After graduation Kathy moved to New York City where she worked and lived with a
few other young women in a bachelorette apartment on the edge of Central Park,
where I visited her a few times, even sleeping on her couch on one
occasion.

When I learned that John Lennon had been murdered, I recalled how one day while
I was visiting her she remarked that Lennon and Yoko Ono lived across the
street in the Dakota apartments, which you could see outside one of the windows
of her apartment. I remembered she said that they frequently saw Lennon get out
of cabs and limos in front of the Dakota, and sometimes they even waved to each
other as they naturally passed each other as neighbors on the street.

But she said she never bothered Lennon by stopping him to talk, and she thought
that he appreciated that, and was one of the reasons he liked living in that
neighborhood, where his celebrity status was not played up on the street.

So I called Kathy in New York City
from my OceanCity,
N. J. home and got her on the phone. When I asked her what was happening, I
could hear sirens and large crowd noises in the background, and she said that
Lennon was dead, murdered right outside, and there were huge crowds forming on
the street outside her window.

She was pretty excited, though quite sad and distraught, and began to explain,
as it sounded like she had put it into words before, “I had just got home
myself, I had gotten out of a cab and was going into my apartment building when
I saw him pull up.”

She said that just as she got off the elevator on her floor she heard a
gunshot, and went into my apartment and opened the window and watched the scene
outside.

I got as much detail as I could out of her and wrote it all down in my notes
and called my editor on the phone and asked if I could still get it in the next
day’s paper. This was years before computers, so I had to write it, type it up
and drive it over to the newspaper office in Absecon, which I did.

Although we were a weekly, the paper went to press that night so it was in the
next day’s edition and for once I was on the same deadline as the bigger
dailies.

They made it a front page story with a nice rendering of Lennon, and I was real
proud of it, and didn’t even notice until someone at the party apologized, as
they had forgotten to put my name on the byline.

I knew I wrote it though, and others who read it said it was a really good
story, as one person noted it was better than the New York Times’ first news
story about the murder because it contained an ear witness report as well as an
eyewitness account of the arrest of Mark David Chapman.

Although I had placed Chapman in the psycho-killer category, I later learned
that the Dakota doorman was a Cuban, a Bay of Pigs
veteran who had been on the CIA payroll, and
may have been somehow implicated in the murder. His very presence there
certainly made the psycho-killer motive more of a cover for a sophisticated
political assassination. John Hinckley’s emergence as a
psycho-killer-political-assassin wannabe made this idea more feasible.

Another fact I didn’t know at the time was Lennon’s resurgence as a political
activist, a new radicalization that was fostered by his hearing some new music
that inspired him to return to the recording studio and to begin a new period
in his multi-facited career.

Then I heard a radio interview with the author of a book on the FBI’s Lennon
files, which documented the extent they went out of their way to intimidate
Lennon and keep him from living in America.

The more I think about it, the more important it seems that these political
assassinations should be studied and understood, so they can be counter-acted
and prevented from ever happening again.

One of the most prestigious pop music lineups ever assembled
is slated to perform for a Hurricane Sandy benefit concert Wednesday at MadisonSquareGarden
in New York City.

Called the 12-12-12
Concert for Sandy Relief, the long-sold out benefit show features a lineup that
includes JerseyShore
rock stalwarts Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. Proceeds from ticket sales
and donations will benefit the Robin Hood Relief Fund, which has distributed
approximately $10.5 million in grants to more than 100 different Hurricane
Sandy-related groups.

Springsteen and Bon Jovi are being joined by Eric Clapton,
Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Chris Martin of
Coldplay, Eddie Vedder, Roger Waters, Kanye West, the Who, Paul McCartney, and,
as of just a few days ago, the Rolling Stones, who are in the midst of their
abridged last-ever world tour.

Many of the participating musicians have recorded video
testimonies, which can be viewed on the 12-12-12 website. Bon Jovi, who returned to New
Jersey following Hurricane Sandy, shared his reaction
to seeing the devastation first hand.

“There have been hurricanes. There have been storms. But
I’ve never seen anything remotely close to what Hurricane Sandy was,” he said
in the short benefit video. “When you see National Guard on Ocean
Avenue in Sea Bright, your jaw drops.”

Springsteen’s testimonial describes the personality of the
shore and its people. His conversation is made somber, unintentionally, perhaps,
by his use of past tense to describe a shore and shore culture that may not
return.

“To see it washed away was just very painful. The size of
the destruction was shocking, and it took days and days to even understand the
level of destruction that occurred along the JerseyShore,” he said. “What makes a
place that place is a fragile thing very often.”

The 12-12-12
benefit, presented by Chase, comes on the heels of a recent Sandy Relief
telethon where Springsteen and Bon Jovi also performed that raised more than
$20 million for the Red Cross.

According to
the 12-12-12 website, Wednesday's concert at 7:30
p.m. will be accessible by 2 billion people throughout the world.
In all, there will be 34 U.S.
network and television feeds providing coverage in North and South
America, Asia, Europe,
Africa and Australia.
The show also will be aired on the radio and streamed live online by multiple
web outlets, including AOL.

For a full list of websites, television stations, movie
theaters and radio stations, click here.

Donations are being solicited online
here. Cell phone users can also donated $10 to Sandy Relief by texting
“ROBINHOOD” to 50555.